Jonathan Fineberg – The Postman Did It – Children’s Art and the Avant-garde

on canvas rather than on the printed page. Artists discovered child
art by way of reflecting on their own work, and they did so long
before any significant writing existed on the subject. There is early
evidence of the interest of artists in the mind and creativity of the
child in Giovanni Francesco Caroto’s portrait (circa 1520) of a boy
with his prototypical child’s bonhomme on an easel [fig.2] and perhaps
in the “tadpole figures,” as the art educators now call them (figures
consisting of heads and limbs but no trunk), that recur in the
paintings of Hieronymous Bosch at the end of the 15th century. 22
Artists from the 17th through the 19th centuries, represented
children engaged in drawing with increasing frequency -- from Rembrandt’s
Christ Preaching [fig.3] (an etching of 1652, which shows
a boy making lines with his finger in the dirt) through Gustave Courbet’s
1855 painting of The Artist’s Studio, a real allegory [fig.4]
(in which the artist portrays his friend Champfleury with a child on
the floor at his feet drawing a stick-figure bonhomme 23 ). Generally,
such depictions involve little concern with the actual drawings produced
by children. Rather, the artists use stereotypes of children’s
drawings as symbols of innocence. Rembrandt does this (yet the
more we learn about children’s drawings, the less innocent of both
inborn and cultural influences they seem). Later the “uncultivated
genius” is set out in Rousseau’s Émile. In Thomas Cole’s The Course
of Empire: The Arcadian Pastoral (1836) [fig.5], the boy chalking
a stick figure on the stones with a classical muse looking on is
another of these “uncultivated geniuses” who stands in the same
relation to the artist as the bucolic arcadia does to the fulfillment of
America’s manifest destiny. Thus in this painting the image involves
a discourse on not only convention and talent but also on geopolitics
and national ideology.
From time to time artists of the 19th century and earlier have
looked at children’s drawings themselves and represented them
graffitied on walls, as in Pieter Janz. Saenredam’s 17th century Interior
of the Buurkerck, Utrecht [fig.6], or inscribed on paper (and
the furniture), as in Sir David Wilkie’s painting of The Blind Fiddler
(1806) [fig.7]. In the Wilkie, a crude grafitto of a cat is scratched
into the side of the wooden cupboard (at the right) with a child’s
drawing pinned up just above it. This does involve Rousseau’s idea
of the child’s natural inclination to draw, and in addition, the child’s
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